Misrepresenting Tenor And Misunderstanding Power And Solidarity

Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 295):

Tenor is concerned with the kind of relationship FitzSimons constructs with his readers. Its key dimensions are power and solidarity. Power is concerned with hierarchical social relations, solidarity with horizontal ones. As far as power is concerned, FitzSimons' position is an authoritative one – he writes for us to read and we read what he writes. The only real say we have is a yet to be realised one, solicited in his invitation to e-mail him with suggestions for historical anecdotes he might use. As we have seen, FitzSimons' authority is enhanced inter-modally – verbally through his blue coloured by-line in the text's macro-Theme and imagically through his Ideal/New position above the image of the beach.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 33) explain the interpersonal dimension of context as follows:

tenor – who is taking part in the situation: (i) the roles played by those taking part in the socio-semiotic activity – (1) institutional roles, (2) status roles (power, either equal or unequal), (3) contact roles (familiarity, ranging from strangers to intimates) and (4) sociometric roles (affect, either neutral or charged, positively or negatively); and (ii) the values that the interactants imbue the domain with (either neutral or loaded, positively or negatively)

[2] This is misleading. To be clear, power is but one system of tenor, and it distinguishes between equal ("horizontal") and unequal ("vertical") status. Relations of solidarity, contrary to the authors' claim, can obtain both between those of equal status ("horizontally") and between those of unequal status ("vertically") — the latter demonstrated by the solidarity between Martin (high status) and his students (low status).

[3] This is misleading, because it confuses dialogic role (writer vs reader) with interpersonal status (unequal vs equal). Clearly, it is not the role of writer that confers higher status in an exchange, as demonstrated by texts written by job applicants.

[4] This is misleading, because neither of these claims about authority have been previously argued for. That is, no argument has been offered as to why a by-line expressed in the colour blue should enhance the authority of the columnist, and no argument has been offered as to why the mere positioning of the columnist's name at the top of his newspaper column should enhance his authority. 

And, as previously explained, this usage of 'ideal' mistakes a construal of experience for textual status, and no argument has been offered as to why the name of the regular columnist should be interpreted as presented as New information.

Moreover, even in their own terms, the authors here have confused textual status (Ideal, New) with interpersonal status (power, authority).